Throughout their history, the Turks have created dozens of states and empires. Some of them are well studied, others less. Perhaps the first Turkic Islamic state, the state of the Karakhanids, can be attributed to the poorly studied, although it left many monuments in the modern territories of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Xinjiang, to which the power of the Karakhanov extended a thousand years ago.

One of the monuments is located in the Kazakh city of Taraz, formerly Dzhambul, in the homeland of Vasily Alibabaevich, where it is warm and where the mother of a gentleman of fortune lived, who received a sentence for breeding gasoline.

The mausoleum of Karakhan is located in a small cozy park in the historical part of the city. On our arrival at the tomb, birds were singing in the park named after Karakhan, it was deserted, and only a caretaker named Daniyar in a skullcap with a white stripe walked in front of the mazar waiting for visitors.

Taking off our shoes, we went into the mausoleum and sat down on kurpeshki. Reading the verses of the Qur'an to the liking of the ruler of the Karakhanid state resting here, the author of the lines felt like a real Qur'an reader, thanks to the wonderful acoustics under the arches of the tomb. On the street, we asked the caretaker questions of interest.

“Fifty kilometers from here there is a place called Atalak, in 751 a big battle took place there,” Daniyar began from afar. - The huge Chinese army, wishing to seize our steppes, was opposed by the army of the Arab Caliphate and Turkic detachments. Together, our ancestors and the Arabs defeated the Chinese. After that, the Turks began to accept Islam. A 40,000-strong Muslim army came here to Taraz under the command of Abdurahim Bab, Abdujalil Bab and Iskhak Bab.

“Here they planted the flag of the Muslim army,” Daniyar pointed to the area on the right in front of the entrance to the mausoleum. - In Soviet times, we did not have our own Muslim government in Kazakhstan, we belonged to the spiritual government in Uzbekistan, and therefore antiques related to the Muslim history of Taraz were transferred there. Ishans from Uzbekistan often come to us, they are very respectful of our city, they say that the first headquarters of the Muslims was in Taraz.

The keeper of the mausoleum had in mind the Battle of Atlakh, which took place in 751 on the Talas River, which ended in the complete defeat of the Chinese army and stopped the expansion of the Celestial Empire into the Great Steppe.

“Then the Turks took power into their own hands, created their empire of Karakhanov, in this mausoleum Karakhan, one of the khans of the dynasty, is buried,” Daniyar continued.

Modern Turks translate "karakhan" as "black khan", however, according to the well-known Kazakh writer-linguist, the author of the sensational book "Az and Ya" in Soviet times, Olzhas Suleimenov, a thousand years ago the word "kara" had another homonymous meaning, meant "great".

- Karakhan - Great Khan;

- Kara-teniz - the Great Sea, not the Black;

- Karabakh is the Great Garden, not the Black;

- Karakypchak - Great Kipchak, etc.

The mausoleum of Karakhan consists of a central hall with a tombstone and three small corner rooms (hujras). The fourth corner of the mausoleum is occupied by a staircase leading to the roof of the building.

In one of the hujras there is a museum, and here you can see ancient jugs, ancient candlesticks, fragments of ceramic pipes that drained water from the city 1000 years ago. Ancient Taraz had its own sewerage system. Daniyar, who combined the positions of caretaker and guide, also conducted a tour of the museum.

In the oral tradition, it is believed that the founder of the Karakhanid empire, Satuk Bograkhan (life years 908-955), the first Turkic ruler who converted to Islam with the name Abdulkarim and the title Karakhan, the Great Khan of the Muslim Turks, is buried in the mausoleum.

However, according to a number of historians, the mausoleum was built over the grave of one of the representatives of the Karakhanid dynasty - Shah-Mahmud Bugr Karakhan.

On the information boards in the park, we read the version according to which the real name of the buried Sha-Mahmud. He was a holy Khazret (Aulie-ata) and was known among the people under the name of Karakhan. His pedigree goes back to Khazreti Ali - the ruler of the faithful Ali ibn Abu Talib. Here is the genealogy, according to which Karakhan is a descendant of Muhammad-Hanafi - the son of Khazreti Ali from a wife named Hanafiya, whom the Imam married after the death of Fatima, the Prophet's daughter to the Aleikhissalam. The great-great-grandchildren of Muhammad Hanafi, after their resettlement in the Abbasid era to Central Asia, taught Islam to the Turks and Sogdians, their descendants today are known as the clan "Khoja, skin". The pedigree looks like this:

Ali ibn Abu Talib - Muhamad Hanafiya - Sha-Abdufattah - Sha-Abdujabbar - Abdukahar (Satuk Bogra-khan) - Sha-Hasan - Abdul-Aziz - Sha-Mahmud, aka Aulie-ata Karakhan.

Aulie-ata (holy father) is one of the names of Taraz. This was the name of the city from 1856 to 1936.In the thirty-sixth, Taraz was named Mirzoyan in honor of the 1st secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Kazakhstan, Levon Mirzoyan. After his arrest and execution in 1938, the city was renamed Dzhambul by the name of akyn Dzhambul Dzhabayev, and under this name it entered the history of Soviet cinema. In 1997, the new authorities of sovereign Kazakhstan considered that the names of the Dzhambul region and the Dzhambul region, the village of Dzhambul were enough to exalt the name of the Soviet akin, who glorified Stalin and Yezhov in his time, and returned the ancient name of the Karakhanid era - Taraz to the city.

In addition to the three main ones, there are other versions about the personality of the deceased in the mausoleum. Legends and legends have intertwined over the centuries, overgrown with speculation, and today there are a variety of versions of the history of the mausoleum. Keeper Daniyar believes that the riddle of the Karakhan mazar, as well as the dark spots of the history of the Karakhanid state, will help to reveal the Iranian archives, with which Kazakhstani historians have been successfully cooperating in recent years.

Further, our way lay outside the city, to two other monuments of the Karakhan period - the mausoleums of Aisha-bibi and Babadzhi-khatun.

bbabo.Net